Distribution Automatique

Friday, January 1

Happy New Decade

Imagine this: Imagine sung by John Lennon played for everyone this year as the ball went down for the crowds on 42cd Street and the many seeing this on tv. Toni and I were struck by the fact that they went through with it, even though it includes the lovely, provocative lines:

"Imagine there's no heavenIt's easy if you tryNo hell below usAbove us only skyImagine all the peopleLiving for today...

Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peace..."

Then, after watching the fireworks over Prospect Park, celebrating the New Year with Toni, I've been spending part of the first hour of the new decade reading a chapbook of poems by Ray DiPalma that he brought over here to give us last week. The book is called Pensieri and it was published by Echo Park Press in Los Angeles.

(from "LITMUS AND THEORY"):

"I had previously regarded it as an unsuspectedknowledge of habit, crediting the universal option:being not unhappy with the response -'I don't presume to know what you lack, but perhapsmy friendship would be of value to you.'The formula elaborates a decorumand offers a sense of confirmation beyond any resourceof patience, most often defined by remaining silent."

I reminded Ray when he visited us last weekend that he had given me my first copy of the aphorisms of Antonio Porchia, translated by WS Merwin, titled Voices. After obtaining Merwin's latest translation lately I've been unable to find on my bookshelves the copy Ray gave me years ago. So I went online and was able to track down and send for another copy of the earlier edition, this copy signed by WS Merwin. Porchia has this amazing ability to find beauty in the places that we generally concede to frustration thereby reclaiming for us some of the most familiar and paradoxically redemptive aspects of existence. This is the aphorism by Porchia I have been thinking about most often lately:

"Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise."

and another:

"Everything is like the rivers. The work of the slopes."

and another:

"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."

and another:

"The have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you they have stopped loving you."

and one more:

""For a thousand years I have been asking myself: "What will I do now?" And still I need not answer."